Faced with difficult questions people often tend to dismiss and marginalize dissent. Political and moral disagreements can be incredibly polarizing, and sometimes even dangerous. And whether it’s Christian fundamentalism, Islamic extremism, or militant atheism, religious dialogue remains tinted by arrogance, dogma, and ignorance. The world needs more people who are sensitive to reasons both for and against their beliefs, and are willing to consider the possibility that their political, religious and moral beliefs might be mistaken. The world needs more intellectual humility.
But what is intellectual humility, anyway? And why do people seem so drawn toward intellectual arrogance? Psychologists, philosophers, theologians, and educationalists are now suggesting some answers.
In this course we try to define intellectual humility and intellectual virtues in general, and ask how we know who is humble. All lectures are delivered by leading specialists, and the course is organised around a number of interesting readings and practical assignments which will help you address issues related to humility in your daily life.
This course is a part of a series which explores the theory, the science and the applied issues surrounding intellectual humility (the latter two coming in June and November 2017). Completing all three courses will give you a broader understanding of this fascinating topic. Look for:
• Intellectual Humility: Science - https://www.coursera.org/learn/intellectual-humility-science
• Intellectual Humility: Practice - https://www.coursera.org/learn/intellectual-humility-practice
You can also follow us on twitter: @EdiPhilOnline and #IHMOOC

Taught By

Professor Duncan Pritchard

Dr. Ian Church

Dr. Emma Gordon

Transcript

[MUSIC] As Dr. Church indicated, my task in this brief lecture is to explore how empirical research might help us further elucidate intellectual humility. Specifically, how both existing and new approaches in the psychological sciences might contribute to understanding this important virtue. I would like to begin by painting a portrait of an intellectually humble person, using the wisdom of the folk. My colleagues and I, including Dr. Church, initiated a study to find out what regular people might think when they conceive of an intellectually humble person, what kind of traits that person might have etc. While most people (save some philosophers and psychologists) have probably not given intellectual humility much thought, it turns out they have a fairly sophisticated understanding of what an intellectually humble person is like. They may not be able to quickly define it, but they know it when they see it. It's a little like the reaction US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart had in the 80s when he admitted he had trouble defining hardcore pornography in a case, and he said "I know it when I see it." Intellectual humility is a little like that. Not like pornography, but like other complex and hard to define concepts. We know them when we see them. Psychologists call such notions implicit theories. They have studied such complex concepts as intelligence, creativity and wisdom to name a few. In our study, we began by asking people to think of words and phrases that characterize an intellectually humble person. From this, we got a list of about 101 words. Then, we asked a separate group of people to rate these words from 1-7 as to how well they described an intellectually humble person. And here are our top 10: humble, not a showoff, doesn't brag, modest, intelligent, smart, thinker, humility, love of learning, and intellectual. Now in the last step in this process, we took the top 50 rated words and phrases and asked a group of people to sort the descriptions into categories according to how similar they were to each other. Through a statistical procedure, we added up the number of times the words were paired with each other, giving us a sense of how many distinct clusters of words there were. Next, we plotted the position of these words in three dimensional space, so that two words often associated with each other would end up located close to each other on the graph. Through these procedures, we created a semantic map of the relationship of these words to each other, according to how similar they were perceived to be. And you can see this in the figure that you see on the screen. And you see we discovered three distinct clusters of descriptures. Three dimensions of an intellectually humble person. There's an epistemic dimension, that's circled in red, that includes descriptors like smart, bright and intelligent, combined with elements such as curiosity inquisitiveness and love of learning. A self-oriented, intrapersonal dimension, circled in green, with words like modest, not a show off, and doesn't brag, which indicate how a person is perceived by others, and then there's an other-oriented interpersonal dimension, circled in blue, with descriptors like, polite, honest, reliable and unselfish, which indicate how a person interacts with others. So, there's this cognitive side of intellectual humility, which has to do with how one thinks, how one exercises one's intellect, and then there's this social side that has to do with how one thinks of oneself in relationship to others, that is intrapersonal, and how one interacts with others, that is interpersonal. I would like to keep these dimensions in mind as we examine various aspects of the psychology that helps us understand intellectual humility. Our goal with this brief introduction and with the whole course, is to develop a more sophisticated understanding of what an intellectually humble person looks like, how that person thinks, how that person acts, how that person interacts with others. So five questions about intellectual humility lead us to five different areas of psychological sciences to answer those questions. The first question is, how do we become intellectually humble? And so we look to developmental psychology for insights about how this virtue develops in human beings, and how it might change over time. The second question: what can human cognition tell us about intellectual humility? And here cognitive psychology can help us. Think about aspects of human cognition that both promote and inhibit the exercise of intellectual humility. The third question: are some people born humble? Personality and social psychology help us understand the traits of an intellectually humble person, and how enduring those traits are. Fourth question: how do emotions affect our ability to be intellectually humble? Research on the impact of emotion on our thinking and our interacting with others in the exchange of ideas can inform the study of intellectual humility. Finally, how do we know who is intellectually humble? Given this rich and complex portrait of an intellectually humble person that psychology offers us, how can we test people, and measure their level of intellectual humility to know how we might grow this important virtue?

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